Gender Inequality, Social Class and Social Mobility

Gender Inequality, Social Class and Social Mobility

Chapter one: Introduction

Introduction

Intergenerational persistence in economic results impacts the perpetuation and aggravation of the resource gap between the wealthy and poor. Research on social mobility in previous years has mainly concentrated on men. However, there is less or no research on the patterns of social mobility of women.

The level of intergenerational mobility in society is perceived as a measure of the degree of equality of economic opportunity. It captures the degree whereby individual situations during childhood are replicated in their success in older years, the extent at which persons can make it version of their own talents and luck. The significance of the notion of social mobility has risen, being viewed as a parameter for measuring the equality of opportunity in a sphere where results are uneven. Social mobility is closely linked to the associated concepts, including inequality, inclusion, and social exclusion, where mobility is the movement between distinct and uneven social groups or classes and between inclusion and exclusion. As Miller (2005) contends, the likelihood of social mobility is one element of the notion of equality of chances which in turn form one of the four foundational principles of justice, along with even citizenship rights, a guaranteed sequence of minimum social rights and fair distribution of extra social rights that are outside citizenship.

From a generational point of view, it is easy to explain the mobility between social groups and classes. Hence, it is important to differentiate at the start between inter-generational and inter-generational mobility. In fact, intergenerational mobility is the movement of persons between distinct social classes during their life and can be gauged between two points in their life. However, social mobility studies demonstrate that there are strong associations between the social positions of women and men in society. As a result of this, intergenerational social mobility is a worry and refers to the variations between the social positions of persons at a certain point in their life with those of their parents.

The individuals in low-power positions because of class or gender do not exhibit self-oriented, but other-oriented behavior. Social class shapes the experiences of women at home and work (Mitnik et al., 2016). The fact that the women were not part of the workforce and social classes were represented by the class positions of the husbands explain why women were excluded from mobility studies (Li, J. H., & Singelmann, 1998). Women are neglected in the labor force because they are perceived to have a much weaker attachment to it, and in the long run, they are employed in lower-class positions. The degree at which the mobility patterns of both genders vary biases the conclusions regarding the fluidity of a society. This research project will examine the relationship between gender inequality, class, and social mobility.

Research Objectives

The long-term goal of the research is to understand the impact of gender differences and social class impact social mobility index. The latter is an aggregate index score computed grounded on a selection of indicators that gauge the social mobility of the nation. The objective of the present study is to offer a comprehensive literature review for the relationship between gender differences, social class, and social mobility, and the study constitutes the subsequent sub-objectives

To understand the role of gender in class-based orientation (the role of gender when determining social class);

To understand the impact of gender differences on social mobility index (if women experience less or more social mobility; what is the reason behind that );

To understand the impact of social class on social mobility index.

The outcome of this study will be vital to industry practitioners to understand the best tools to use to avoid gender stereotypes in a world that is characterized by social stratification and mobility.

Research Questions

The following research questions need to be addressed:

What is the role of gender when determining social class? (Does the gender play a role when we compute social class)

What is the impact of gender differences on the social mobility index? (If women experience more or less mobility compared to men and the other way around)

What is the impact of social class on social mobility index?

What is the effect of gender differences and social class on the social mobility index?

Hypothesis

Gender and class have a significant impact on social mobility index;

The impact of social class on social mobility index might be distinct for men and women.

Chapter 2: Literature Review

The debate on the relevance of social class for personal lives and identities is quite long. These debates have repercussions for the research approaches for social scientists using class and gender for illuminating other results of interests. Simultaneously, in a pretext defined by prevailing or even rising inequalities in results and opportunities, it is significant to grasp how many measures of social position operate and to what extent they entail meaningful predictors of many results bring together a collection of outcomes of interest to social scientists. Many studies have discussed the present issues in gauging social class and social stratification variables and present study that assess the role of these factors in illuminating results, including the perceptions of individuals regarding economic inequality or danger of entry into poverty or assessing topics including social mobility regimes and inequality of educational opportunities.

The inquiry of whether aspects of social stratification are losing ground as significant explanatory variables for distinct results might be approached from distinct standpoints. The class position itself has evolved as alienated from personal lives and identities, or the parameters of social class and position we use in the research on social stratification are no longer appropriate to capture the conceptual meaning of the personal social position in the society or might be an integration of both.

There are many choices that have been anciently or more lately used in social stratification studies to gauge social position. These choices replicate the distinctions at the conceptual level, though also in the empirical framework taken to come up with measures of social position. It is recommended to operationalize social position as a multiple or single dimension, it is an incessant measure, a gathering of continuous measures, or it is a discrete aspect. A portion of the schemes uses three classes or more than one hundred groupings. The latest suggestions in the literature and the application of models with latent variables in social stratification research have recommended that it is better to use the many indicators to gauge every parameter to explain the origin of the measurement errors. For scholars adopting a model whereby the social origins and social status are the latest variables with many indicators, an extra question is required on whether the model should be a reflective indicator model.

There is no appropriate way to approach the conceptualization and measurement of social position, and every strategy is characterized by strengths and limitations, relying on the research question. In the context of the present choices for conceptualizing and gauging the social positions, the multidimensional technique appears to be the most sophisticated and have a better understanding. The former would be more suited to capture the social status based on the conceptual frameworks that consider the capitals, and it is better implemented at capturing circumstances. The latter is designed to delimit classes with a high extent of structuration that would be more precisely capture the association between class and life situations when compared to conventional schemes. However, two strategies have extremely high demands based on the necessitated data to build these measures and not often have the present indicators. Currently, the middle-class scheme is only present for the American context and would be required to be implemented for use in cross-national research.

Gender Inequality

Gender is one of the main dimensions of inequality and stratification in American society. It intersects in many and complex ways with such dimensions of inequality and stratification as social class and social mobility. It is problematic to imagine any element of society that is not in some perspective ‘gendered.’ This is especially true in the realm of inequality.

Martin (2004) defined gender and sex as socially and biologically constructed categories, respectively. He perceived gender as a structure instead of a solitary physical property of a person. This distinction is not often obvious in practice, and it is not uncommon for sociologists to treat gender and sex interchangeably, though it is significant to reminisce that, unlike sex, societies create and are developed by gender. Ridgeway (2009) argued that gender offered a frame to coordinate the norm and organize social relations.

England (2010) contended that the persistence of cultural devaluation of women’s jobs had weakened the trend towards gender equality. In the American context, England demonstrates that women abandoned the jobs of women and shifted to men’s jobs only when that was the only trajectory of upward mobility present to them. Men had no reimbursements to leave treasured men’s work for devalued women’s work under any circumstances. The elite women have shifted to traditional male jobs that only a few years ago were denied to them in significant quantities.

Family and other demographic aspects are instrumental in altering the patterns of gender inequality. The increasing levels of education among women have joined with more effective modes of regulating their fertility and disseminating behaviors in culture favoring small families and even the decision to remain childless to allow the women to become financially dependent. This has happened simultaneously that socio-economic success has been stagnant. Autor & Wasserman (2013) noted that the comparative decline of men had engaged only real wage levels though also rates of employment and skills acquisition. The outcome of this confluence of broad social trends is that marriage will no longer hold the value that women initially did. The authors observed that this accelerated a drastic decrease in the marriage rates of non-college adults and an increase in the portion of American children that are born out of wedlock and significant growth in the ratio of children reared in houses defined by absent fathers.

In the United States, gender relationships are dynamic, and the disparity between women and men is questioned in every area right from the workplace, public affairs, and home. Gender disparities persist even in the brink of startling economic and social transformations and concerted movements to challenge the subordination of women. The persistence of gender disparity in the economic, legal, and political processes that work against it recommends that there are continuous social processes that reconstruct gender inequality.

Widely shared gender stereotypes serve as a ‘common knowledge’ cultural frame that individuals use to start the process of socializing with each other and coordinating their interaction. This might appear clear and harmless. The application of gender as a framing tool in individual interactions has many unintended repercussions as gendered connotations get carried away beyond facets of life having to do with reproduction. Social scientists have garnered proof that presumptions and stereotypes regarding men and women reshape the daily individual interactions and gender disparity in wages, jobs, authority, and family responsibilities. Men are defined as authoritative, while women are more communal in orientation. During job interviews, men and women have similar qualifications as one gender is given more priority according to traditional presumptions regarding gender proclivities.

Social Class

            The terminology ‘social class’ is the most disputed and puzzling phenomenon in the social sciences. The descriptive conceptions of class use groups such as the “the rich,” “the poor,” or “the one percent to define the location of a patient within a distribution of some treasured resource. A concentration on objective social class involves the determination of the social class of the individual grounded on the socioeconomic variables, particularly education, income, occupation, and wealth. The second approach to social class handles how individuals position themselves into groups.

Relationship between Gender Inequality, Social Class and Social Mobility

Limited progress has been made to understand how gender differences and social class affect the social mobility index. A growing body of literature on gender disparity in mobility has started to emerge in the latest years. Hayes and Miller (1993) argued that the convectional exemption of women from mobility research has met strong criticism from feminists and has caused worries among the social stratification researchers regarding the restrained understanding of the process of social mobility because of the omission of women. The women have improved their workforce participation in industrial nations. Even though the involvement of the female workforce has increased, the women have continued to be assigned low-level positions.

In contrast, men have been awarded high-status positions in the occupational hierarchy (Hayes & Miller, 1993). Notably, McGinn & Oh (2017) argue that in the workplace, cultural and occupational conditions differ by social class. Gender is instrumental in the employment of women when the latter are in the majority in a work setting. Chetty et al. (2014), examined the relationship between social class and social mobility and argued that there is substantial variation in absolute and relative intergenerational mobility in the social context across countries. Due to differences in social class in different regions, the relative mobility was found to be lowest in children that grow in the southwest side of the United States and highest in the rural Midwest and Mountain West. The factors that erode the middle class affect intergenerational mobility more compared to the factors that result in income growth.

When working in professions where men are the majority, women will face gender-oriented bias (Turco, 2010), and the latest evidence recommends this bias might be higher for upper class comparative to the middle class, women (Rivera & Tilcsik, 2016). The amplification of gender bias might increase the recognition of upper-class women as female, whereas potentially distorting with class-oriented recognition.  The female managers and professionals benefit because of the increase in the presence of women in leadership positions (Lee at al., 2017), though dependence on the minority of leaders who are female might increase recognition with gender and reduce identification with class.

McGinn & Oh (2017) argues that in earlier research has demonstrated relatively consistent proof when absolute rates of social mobility attained via occupational status are assessed; there is a weaker inclination for daughters than sons to inherit their occupation position or social class of their fathers. In addition, women were discovered to be much more probable than men to be downwardly mobile. According to Corak (2013), mobility is lowered by inequality because it shapes opportunities. Mobility changes incentives, opportunities, and institutions that develop and transmit skills and characteristics that are most valued in the labor market. Mobility shifts the balance of power to position some groups to structure policies. Individuals who are more concerned with equal opportunities should consider taking care of outcomes of inequality in gender. Parents can transmit opportunities to their children in the form of economic advantage via social connections that facilitate access to capital sources and jobs. In high-income countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, their values and demographic diversity implies that it is not desirable to change the intensity of mobility.

References

Li, J. H., & Singelmann, J. (1998). Gender differences in class mobility: A comparative study of the United States, Sweden, and West Germany. Acta Sociologica, 41(4), 315-333. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/000169939804100402

Mitnik, P. A., Cumberworth, E., & Grusky, D. B. (2016). Social mobility in a high-inequality regime. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 663(1), 140-184.

Miller, R.L., 2005. Social mobility in Europe. The British Journal of Sociology, 56(4), pp.665-666.

Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P., & Saez, E. (2014). Where is the land of opportunity? The geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4), 1553-1623. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/129/4/1553/1853754

Corak, M. (2013). Income inequality, equality of opportunity, and intergenerational mobility. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(3), 79-102. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.27.3.79

Hayes, B. C., & Miller, R. L. (1993). The silenced voice: female social mobility patterns with particular reference to the British Isles. British Journal of Sociology, 653-672. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.2307/591415

Lee, H. J., Chua, C. H., Miska, C., & Stahl, G. K. (2017). Looking out or looking up: gender differences in expatriate turnover intentions. Cross Cultural & Strategic Management. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hyun-Jung_Lee/publication/311800611_Looking_out_or_looking_up_Gender_differences_in_expatriate_turnover_intentions/links/5a0035d8a6fdcca1f29f6b52/Looking-out-or-looking-up-Gender-differences-in-expatriate-turnover-intentions.pdf

Li, J. H., & Singelmann, J. (1998). Gender differences in class mobility: A comparative study of the United States, Sweden, and West Germany. Acta Sociologica, 41(4), 315-333. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/000169939804100402

McGinn, K. L., & Oh, E. (2017). Gender, social class, and women’s employment. Current Opinion in Psychology, 18, 84-88. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.07.012

Rivera, L. A., & Tilcsik, A. (2016). Class advantage, commitment penalty: The gendered effect of social class signals in an elite labor market. American Sociological Review, 81(6), 1097-1131. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122416668154

Turco, C. J. (2010). Cultural foundations of tokenism:Evidence from the leveraged buyout industry. American Sociological Review, 75(6), 894-913. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122410388491